L'Arc en Ciel fanfiction .::. Offer and Demand

Episode 13

It’s been a week so far. I haven’t been able to concentrate much. All I can think about is my current situation and how things got so out of hand.
I’m here, sitting in my dressing room at the backstage of Bubble Festival. I can hear the muffled sound of Ken’s band playing from this place.
Ken’s been very kind offering me to play in their festival… but I don’t think my newly formed band can live up to the expectations the audience has. We have just had too little time to practice.
Oh, well… the audience didn’t come here to watch “me” specifically. But I guess being on the top and then coming tumbling down is harder than I had thought.
There’s a mirror here and my back is turned to it. I’m holding a can of soda in one hand, and even if I can’t see myself, I know I must look beaten.
My band-members are chatting lively and laughing. I am a shadow of a man.
I haven’t talked to Sakura about this… to the point I think he’s offended with me. Ken-chan doesn’t know anything and he’s been saying I’m just “in one of my typical brooding moods.” Gackt never called me again… and I never called him either.
My wife hasn’t called me. Nor have my parents… nor Tetsu… nor anyone at all.
I feel so lonely and screwed up.
And to make things worse, I still can’t make phone calls from my cell phone. It’d be so convenient if I could… I might try to make everyone feel guilty about abandoning me. I might practice with Yukihiro, but I guess he’d just call me a retard and hang up on me.
He’s done that before… Once… when I called him… I was so drunk…
I think I’m gonna wait here until something happens… yeah… or until I get thrown out. I don’t want to walk into the world again. I just want to stay here, safe and protected from the outside world; clutching my can of soda, and holding on to it for dear life.

Another song… I should consider myself lucky I don’t have to hear Ken singing from close by. I sip from my can again (it’s already lukewarm and it lost the bubbles).
Hiroki says something… I can hear his voice but I don’t catch the words. I feel like I’m having a fever. Everything grows distant, and then, it suddenly comes back to me fast.

I wonder if there’s something funny in this soda…?

Furuton places an arm around my shoulders and Hiroki sits by my side.
“Everything OK, Haido?” Furuton asks.
“Uh… yeah… I’m just… absent minded… a little tired, and…”
“Hiroki… he was talking to you…”
“Huh?”
Hiroki hands me an envelope.
“Haido… I said there was a message for you.” Hiroki talks to me as if I had Alzheimer’s disease.
“Uh… I’m… sorry. Really sorry. I was… hmm… absent-minded.”
“Yeah… we thought so.” Furuton says and nods. I hear him mumbling something that sounds remotely as “Sakura warned me…” but I choose to ignore it.
I hold the envelope in my hand, touching the can of soda… and I notice it’ll get stained but I don’t think I care now… until I suddenly remember…
“Holy shit!”
“Haido?” Furuton and Hiroki look at me. I try to excuse myself and I rush into the restroom. This is quite unexpected… maybe.
This envelope… I know this envelope. It’s the same kind of envelope I used to get sent when I got instructions from my “client”.
I slit it open and my heart races while doing so.

“Good luck, pretty boy.”

It’s not signed (it doesn’t need to be).

Let’s see… I can drop to the floor and cry like a baby. Or… I can ignore this and pretend nothing really happened. I can also call the police… or I can run home to mommy and daddy…
Whichever I choose, it’ll be pointless.

I used to have a money problem.
Now I have both a money problem and a psycho-stalker problem.
I seem to go from bad to worse.
It annoys me because I think if he hadn’t become such a pain in the ass I would have… maybe… indulged in his proposal. After all, it wasn’t that bad.
Hmm…
To be honest…
It rocked.

But this is very sick. Incredibly sick. He’s sick.
He’s so sick he needs professional attention urgently.
What the fuck…? I’m gonna send him a text message. Yeah, I will.

“Fuck you. Call me.”
That’ll do.
I need a cigarette and I need to get the hell out of here. This stupid place is not protecting me anymore.

I picked up my coat and a scarf.
The guys gave me a weirded-out look. “I’ll go catch some fresh air.” I mumble and I leave the dressing room.
It’s so cold outside, the wind is lashing my face like a merciless whip.
I push my hands in my pockets and I swear in silence.
I try to light a cigarette but the wind keeps blowing the lighter off. Sheltering the flame with my hand doesn’t work. It seems everything is against me.
I start to look around, trying to find a little corner of something in order to light my cigarette. I am very determined when it comes to smoking.
I walk without direction until I find a grisly latrine in the rear of the festival premises. I shelter myself against it and light my cigarette not without effort.
When I inhale, the smoke stings my throat and nose, but soon the taste of tobacco on my tongue makes me feel a little better.
I sit against the latrine wall and sigh. I don’t know what to do. I hear the distant noise… er… sound of Ken-chan’s band and I start trying to weave up this hank of problems into one neat and understandable situation. I feel like a rat trapped inside a maze. I gotta figure out how to escape.

As I could have guessed, Gackt called me.
The bastard laughed at my concerns and said I was making too much of a fuss about things. That I was a paranoid, and that he had only meant to greet me.
I am very suspicious of him.
We arrange to meet in Osaka… a nice hotel there that we both know.
I don’t know what his plans are, but one thing is for sure: I’m not gonna let him lay me this time. This time I wanna talk to him and get all the shit out. This time I wanna set things straight with him. (Then, maybe, we can fuck.)

I must have smoked ten cigarettes before I returned to the dressing room.
Yatchan was there with Furuton and Hiroki. They were waiting for me, they said. Yatchan said it made him very nervous that nobody knew where I was.
I tried to come up with a good excuse…
“I was shitting, Yatchan.”
“There’s a restroom here.”
“I would have polluted the air so much, nobody would have been able to breathe.”
“And where did you go shitting?”
“Uh… far.”
“How far?”
“To an old latrine behind the premises.”
“You are sick.” Yatchan snorts. At least he bought the lie.
Yatchan lent me his cell phone (I told him mine had run out of batteries) and I managed to call my wife.
She nagged me, and she said she was busy.
That bitch…
Apparently the dog had some sort of digestive problem as a consequence of too much chewing on my slippers.
Damn… I hope those were not my favorite slippers… the ones with the Harry Potter logo…
Yatchan… that bastard… had a big laugh at my present home-life.
“You don’t look like a rock star now… you look like my neighbor back in Nerima.” He kept saying and laughing.
That imbecile… (I mean Yatchan… not his neighbor)

I return the cell phone to Sakura by pushing it against his chest, and then I pick up my stuff. He doesn’t look hurt or anything… in fact, he sounds amused.
Hmm… at least I gather he’s amused, judging by his roaring laughter.
I stick my tongue out at him and head towards the van that’ll take us to the hotel.
He keeps laughing. Oh, I so want to choke him.
Fortunately, he won’t follow me into my hotel room. Fortunately for him. I have a pretty knife there.

And so, once I get out of the van, head towards my room followed by a cackling up Sakura, and slam the door to his face; I try to get some sleep. When I wake up tomorrow it will be late afternoon already, and I will head over to the hotel… the hotel where Gackt is.

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